Just like the students Quill.org aims to help, the writing assistant’s algorithms get smarter the more they practice.

The nonprofit’s Quill Connect tool, designed to improve students’ writing skills through online exercises, uses machine learning to help them create better sentences. As Quill Connect gains more data, its algorithms morph and improve, says Peter Gault, Quill’s executive director — enabling it to address the big issues of sentence fragments and run-ons.

For teachers, it was such a big challenge to implement this type of instruction. It is so time-intensive. It was always a challenge to have time to give feedback.

Online tools weren’t always the best answer, since combining thoughts and sentences can yield thousands of correct results. So Quill built out a series of algorithms that can distinguish strong sentences from weak ones.

That is where machine learning comes in.

The algorithm looks at common patterns and criteria for strong and weak sentences, Gault says, and is now able to detect sentence fragments at 84 percent accuracy.

Giving Compass' Take:
• The authors recap various panel discussions at SSIR's 2019 Data on Purpose Conference that focus on how nonprofit leaders, funders, scholars, and technologists can thrive in a digital world.
• How is the onset of increasingly digital spaces going to affect donors?
• Read more about the future of digital life and well-being.
From emphasizing the importance of a data culture to exhorting people to “move thoughtfully and improve things,” nonprofit leaders, funders, scholars, and technologists at SSIR's 2019 Data on Purpose Conference provided deep insights into surviving and thriving in an increasingly digital world.
If you're feeling like an idiot trying to navigate the technologies and data that increasingly shape nonprofits' operations and strategies, Alix Dunn with Computer Says Maybe and the Stanford PACS Digital Civil Society Lab has a message for you: you're not.

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